Disagree, but that's fine. Only so many users, attention, etc. Heroic will probably see degradation.

They're entirely welcome to do this, I just think there's room for more opportunity with combined/open effort. Idealistic? Sure.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that doing nothing remains an option.

As much as i hate the pointless Linux fragmentation, I think them going down the path of steam/heroic games launcher and releasing one appimage/.deb file and letting others take on the burden for their distros should do.

I mean, the main issue with portability is the insistance on dynamic linking, far more than the distro situation.

If you use Linux like MacOS and only run static binaries and containerized programs via things like flatpak everything is fine.

It's totally possible to treat the distro simply as a thin base layer and get everything else from flatpak and the various container hubs. It does work great.

Guess what has been serving those gamers, actually I'll be kind: Heroic.

The impression I've had for a long while now is that just as the software side is fragmented so is the userbase in what they want, including a segment that want one true way and all that fragmentation to go away. The trouble I see with catering to all that variation is it's putting an onus for more work on the developer (which needs funding from somewhere, most likely the publisher) and while linux (and GOG) is a niche market in the present and near term it doesn't seem like a winning proposition.

There's definitely a desire for an appliance/console like experience where all the complexity is hidden behind install/play buttons, and steam has got most of the way there. As protondb shows that can't go all the way and tweaking is needed owing to the shifting PC compatibility in general and running software from one OS on a different one, it's the nature of the beast.

... and I'm concurring with the threadstarter. They could do nothing, donate to Heroic, or this. I'm not invested in this, just raised a keyword.

The arguments are tired, the word serves us well. They insist, yes, and forever remain hopeful that This Might Be the Year. Meanwhile, the reality exists for plenty already.

So many replies. Hello everyone. Beats me, just commenting as someone who won't pivot to the new thing. Outcomes matter, etc.

Supporting Heroic would appear on-brand given their old game/archival messaging, but I'm not doing marketing for free.

Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)

Really? What games are those? I've not encountered a single one :/

Not quite. You can use Galaxy to download the offline installers (or just do that through the website), but when you install a game through Galaxy, it downloads a special build which it just copies to the right location, without running a separate installer.

No, it doesn't use offline installers. Source: worked on that in the past.

https://content-system.gog.com/

The running game can also call out to Galaxy and unlock, or not unlock, ingame content based on what it hears back. It's pretty difficult to imagine a definition of "digital rights management" that doesn't include this.

How would you define it if:

- the DRM/delivery software is open source

- the game payload is sent to you encrypted using the public key of a secure enclave on your computer

- while the game runs all its memory is symmetrically encrypted (by your own CPU) using a key private to that secure enclave. It is only decrypted in the CPU's cache lines, which are flushed when the core runs anything other than the game (even OS code)

- the secure enclave refuses to switch to the context in which the CPU is allowed to use the decryption key unless a convolution-only (not overwriteable with arbitrary values) register inside itself had the correct value

- the convolution-only register is written with the "wrong" value, by your own computer's firmware, if you use a bootloader that is not trusted by the DRM system to disallow faking the register (ie, you need secure boot and a trusted OS)

That doesn't seem to fit in any of your models. There's no online check, you can't send someone else the key because it's held in hostile-to-you hardware, you can't bypass the local-PC check because it's entirely opaque to you (even the contents of RAM are encrypted). You can crack into a CPU itself I guess?

I don't think the mechanism of the DRM being open source helps with the copying AT ALL in this design.

This design is, by the way, quite realistic: most modern CPUs support MK-TME (encrypted RAM mediated by a TPM) and all Windows 11 PCs have a TPM. Companies just haven't gotten there yet.